If you leave me alone for long enough I start writing in my notebook

And then when I come on here there’s no choice but to call it blargh-ing. I can’t tell you how excited I am for the Agamben, et al book Democracy in What State?. I think that there were parts written in French and new bits added in English (trans by William McCuaig). I rifled through CUP’s computer and printed it out weeks ago. I want that hard copy so I can write forever about it. Also waiting for Marxism and Form to come in the mail to I can start reading that.

I’m turning 21 tomorrow.

and then spring break next week. I sincerely promise to read and do real work on here, less blarg-ing. And less poetry–it’s getting to me.

apologies

I’ve mostly recovered. I have had some whiny blog entries, but that one was great: it was not only whiny but also self-righteous. my favorites. moving on,

I’m not too sure what the policy on this one is, so I won’t give a title or anything, but I’ve just read a *fantastic* manuscript on democracy. I think it’s due out in May, I’ll keep you posted. I will be bold and list the contributors in order: Agamben, Badiou, Bensaid, Brown, Nancy, Ranciere, Ross, Zizek.

Probably one of my favorites, ever. I wish I could blog about it but I don’t want to get yelled at. Soon enough, soon enough.

Waning Sentimental

Less than a half an hour ago, I walked out of my French final. I am a free woman; goodbye Fall 2009. But I’m not at all happy about it. This semester was by the far the best experience I have ever had in my life. I learned how to read, how to think, how to write, how to teach.

But I know someone who would tell me that I already knew what I thought, I was already who I am, but I must take one small divergence from accepting that and say thank you to everyone in my life that assisted my education. Made my education what it is;

perhaps I shouldn’t address this entry in the second person informal–my teachers span continents, decades, often miss each other by whole lifetimes. The books they write were sometimes written for their times, but more often than not, they were written for this moment. Then there are my physically present teachers, I should call them my mentors, and without them, one in particular, I think I would have shut down and forgotten the whole bit completely.

To my friend, my housemate and person-I-can-always-convince-to-break-stupid-laws, thank you for writing with me and thank you for letting me be “cosmic” most of the time.

At the end of every Tuesday meeting for my independent study, I walked down the street, the same vacant, dirty, loud street–

There were the buildings, but they did not matter. The puddles on the side of the road, growing deeper. The way that I could walk in and out of sunshine. The frigid clouds billowing in the distance. The strip of sky above the avenue that could not, would not let itself be touched except by a spindling branch. And all the while, the new freeze washed over with the wind. Always brushing across my face, my hair on my cheek, guiding the fraying bits of daylight softly into my eyes. On the sidewalk I was triumphant.

What is the Common?

What is the Common; the common? Is it the expression of freedom, the expression of democracy (in the most profound and, therefore, unheard of way)? If the common is not something like a programme, is it political? Or is it a way of life?

In Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri’s book  In Praise of the Common the term isn’t defined in many positive terms. In most of the book, there are little skermishes around the edges of the concept–of the term–but what is most striking is the incredibly apparent presence of its foes.

Structuralism is the biggest and baddest of them all. Followed by dialectics and totalization, to a degree. Now, as I’m writing this, I’m thinking to myself: “hm, this seems like rather a structuralist way of charting out the barricades.” I will let it stay, however;

If the common is something like the transfer of knowledge, like the conversation between friends and colleagues that grows out of love (and just what love is, remains to be seen…) it makes sense that the common is a fragmented unit. I’m not sure that fragmented is the right way to look at it, either. The common seems to refer to something like the social process in itself; the common is produced from the multitude.

This term, too, is very ambiguous. So far, I’m constructing my understanding of the multitude on AN/CC’s work as well as on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘Whatever Singularity.’

Whatever Singularity is the aspect of the common, I think, as a property of the multitude. The multitude, which is fundamentally against the powers consolidated into the One, will make its formation in the commonality of whatever singularity.

…I don’t think I said much just now; I’m going to reread Agamben and get back to this concept more explicitly.